Effective collaboration and information sharing are critical for modern organisations in today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape. However, managing all those documents, lists and intranet sites across teams can get chaotic without the right platform. This is where Microsoft SharePoint comes in.
Microsoft SharePoint stands out as a robust solution, but its successful integration necessitates a well-crafted SharePoint deployment plan. A successful SharePoint deployment relies on thoughtful planning and preparation. Organisations can fully leverage SharePoint’s capabilities by adequately identifying business needs, designing robust architecture, addressing security, and creating a streamlined content plan upfront.
We’ve distilled our experience into a practical SharePoint deployment guide to help your team deploy the solution smoothly. It covers best practices for each project stage to optimise the platform and avoid common pitfalls. With this guide, you can build a SharePoint environment that realises the platform’s full potential while minimising headaches for administrators and maximising value for the end users.
Let’s get started.
Defining business goals and requirements
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty details of deploying SharePoint, you must clearly understand your organisation’s specific goals or requirements. Why does your company want SharePoint in the first place? Increased collaboration capabilities? Better document organisation? Identifying the particular business needs, desired features, and expected measurable outcomes. That clarity will drive all downstream decisions.
With SharePoint, pinpoint the exact features and functionality that are needed. More importantly, future-proof your content management by identifying and defining all data types in SharePoint.
You can consider following these steps:
- Identify key users – Who will create, edit, and govern documents?
- Analyse usage – How many sites are needed? How will content be structured?
- Categorise content – Use metadata, properties, and templates to aid the organisation.
Are you looking for specific SharePoint requirements?
Best practices for a seamless SharePoint deployment
Drawing from our experience across countless deployments, we want to share proven methods that smooth the path to SharePoint’s success. These best practices span from planning to post-launch, enabling organisations to leverage the platform’s capabilities fully.
a) Implementing a deployment roadmap
A key tenet of an effective SharePoint deployment plan is having a phased rollout roadmap, breaking the initiative into stages – from infrastructure readiness to pilot testing and beyond. Such an approach makes big tasks more manageable. For example, content migration becomes more manageable when tackled in waves based on priority.
b) Close collaboration with the dev team
Close coordination between IT administrators, developers, and business teams is crucial in any deployment plan. Silos can derail deployments through misaligned priorities or simple miscommunication. Keeping all stakeholders looped in keeps your SharePoint deployment guide on track regardless of the roadblocks. And later, unified troubleshooting between admins and developers resolves user adoption barriers faster.
c) Consistent testing
Another crucial practice is to conduct consistent testing throughout the deployment process.
While a detailed SharePoint deployment plan sets the course, vigilant testing steers you there. This approach allows the team to identify and address issues promptly, ensuring that the deployment aligns with the planned business objectives.
d) Thorough documentation
Even with careful planning, real-time developments can influence the project’s direction. So, rather than relying on faulty memory, documenting every aspect of the deployment process can make things simple down the line. Months later, documentation can offer instant clarity when recalling why certain permissions or site workflows exist.
Planning the design and architecture (SharePoint deployment plan)
Another foundational element of any SharePoint deployment plan is mapping the supporting infrastructure and architecture and encouraging strategic decisions on server quantity, types, configuration, and more.
Depending on your specific requirements, you may choose between SharePoint single server and SharePoint farm deployments, in addition to server-based options, other deployment choices exist, including SharePoint Online, hybrid, and multi-tenant deployment.
When weighing options in your SharePoint deployment, consider factors like:
- Scalability – A single server works for smaller use cases without growth expectations. However, larger organisations should use multi-server farms that are better suited for expansion.
- Performance – More users and higher usage loads require greater server capacity to maintain speed.
- Customisations – Extensive custom dev or third-party integrations may need more resources and may also impact the number of servers required.
Proactively planning for these structural considerations in your deployment plan ensures a solid and adaptable foundation for SharePoint’s success.
User provisioning and permissions planning
A crucial aspect of your SharePoint deployment plan involves establishing user provisioning and permissions within the new environment. We recommend seamlessly integrating Azure Active Directory (AD) to sync with existing accounts/groups.
With Azure AD integration, SharePoint inherits those centralised identities and credentials. This convenience encourages user adoption while reducing administrator overhead. From an IT perspective, Azure AD alignment also unifies identity and access management across Microsoft 365.
In addition to user account management, Azure’s built-in security features can enhance access controls and promote secure team collaboration. For example, fine-grained access controls on the network layer enable administrators to dictate authorised devices and logins. Policies can be tiered based on user attributes for easy delegation of document visibility.
Setting up sites and site collections
Establishing the overall structure and hierarchy of sites in SharePoint is a crucial step in your deployment plan. But rather than the IT team unilaterally deciding the hierarchy, it should be a collaborative process.
Gather input from business teams on existing content workflows and tools. This real-world use case insight ensures the architecture aligns with actual work patterns. Once the most suitable site collection hierarchy is decided, you can proceed to customise the appearance and functionality of each site to align with the organisation’s requirements.
While a streamlined site plan requires initial legwork upfront, it pays long-term dividends to the business in improved workflows and maximises ROI.
Content population and organisation across the sites
With architecture mapped and site creation underway, the next step in your Sharepoint deployment plan is the content population. This phase is crucial for user adoption as it directly affects the day-to-day experience.
Make sure you focus on:
- Training site owners on library usage for modular storage.
- Leveraging SharePoint’s built-in content organiser feature.
- Careful metadata tagging for effortless content discovery.
- Making use of Sharepoint’s records management capabilities.
- This includes custom views to display relevant files in a user-friendly manner.
Getting these elements right from day one reduces headaches for users and administrators alike. It also ensures businesses fully utilise SharePoint’s powerful document management capabilities.
Continuous user training, support, and maintenance
As key stakeholders, end users ultimately determine SharePoint deployment success. Yet training and support often get overlooked once the deployment concludes. This missed opportunity can severely hinder user adoption and ROI.
Maintaining an open line of communication and actively listening to end users’ concerns is paramount. This approach allows the deployment teams to establish a consistent feedback loop, identify areas of confusion, and address issues proactively to prevent any problems from ballooning.
Making users the priority during and post-rollout can be challenging. But getting this phase right cements SharePoint’s value and fuels innovation.
Conclusion
The steps outlined in this article are pivotal for a successful SharePoint deployment. From delineating business goals and requirements, establishing an application development lifecycle, meticulous documentation, setting up user accounts and groups, managing permissions, and overseeing content to post-deployment user training, – there are many considerations to address before implementing SharePoint in your organisation.
This is why we believe every SharePoint deployment plan needs expert guidance. Our team at Neologix brings decades of deployment experience across industries. We take an end-to-end approach – from architecture to deployment and beyond – tailored to each business’s unique needs. All this while ensuring minimum disruption to business operations.
For personalised support and consultation on SharePoint deployment, please contact us at info@neologix.ae or +971-521043226.
